1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to display devices, and in particular to an apparatus and method to display content in a transparent vessel.
2. Background of the Invention
Transparent vessels such as bottles have long been used to display a wide variety of items: model ships, different-colored sand, etc.
It would be desirable to provide to an apparatus and method to display content in a transparent vessel, however, wherein content such as text and pictures may be quickly and easily inserted and immobilized in a transparent vessel, and nearly as easily exchanged for different content.
Existing Designs
A number of approaches have been proposed to provide a bottle for pictorial and textual content display. U.S. Pat. No. 6,378,906 was granted Pennaz for a label inserted in a bottle wall. While this design provided content visible from outside the bottle, the content had to be inserted into the wall of the bottle during the manufacturing process, and could not be changed thereafter without breaking the bottle.
A number of patents have been granted for labels immersed in clear liquid inside bottles, some requiring grooves, projections, or other content-stabilizing means. Representative of this “clear liquid” class of inventions are U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,233,856, 6,073,373 and 5,937,554 granted to Haugk et al.; 6,725,589 to Braun; 6,272,777 to Swenson; and 5,758,440 to Yudin. These designs suffered from the disadvantage of requiring a transparent liquid in the bottle to be able to see the content (as opposed to an opaque liquid), and in some cases (notably the Haugk patents), some species of grooves, projections, etc., which increase manufacturing cost and complexity.
Another class of content-display bottles involve two nesting containers, the outer container being transparent, and the content sandwiched between the two nesting containers. Exemplary of this type of container are U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,979,325 and 3,374,911 granted White. The requirement of duplicative containers raised the manufacturing cost and complexity in these devices.
Still another approach was taught in the Kuhn et al. U.S. Pat. No. 1,725,199, which relied on the application of decals to an inside bottle surface. These could be problematic to later remove and replace with different content, and this design suffered from the drawback of having to convert any content desired to be displayed into decals before being able to install the content in the bottle. This requirement raises the cost, complexity, and difficulty of content emplacement in a bottle in accordance with the Kuhn '199 method.